What counts at each stage?
Digital Rocket's franchise lead-quality cohort follows a dated group from inquiry to qualified candidate, validation, discovery, and signed franchise, with one written rule for each transition.
| Stage | Count when | Do not count when |
|---|---|---|
| Inquiry | A unique person submits an attributable request during the cohort window. | Duplicate, test, spam, vendor, or existing-owner records. |
| Qualified candidate | The franchisor's recorded commercial criteria are met and review status is known. | Marketing infers financial suitability, legal eligibility, or protected traits. |
| Validation | The candidate completes the franchisor's documented validation milestone. | A meeting is merely scheduled or duplicated. |
| Discovery | The declared discovery-stage requirement is completed. | An invitation alone is treated as attendance. |
| Signed franchise | The governing agreement is executed under the client's counting policy. | A deposit, verbal commitment, or pipeline probability is substituted. |
How the cohort is measured.
- Freeze the cohort start and end dates before reading the outcome.
- Deduplicate people using the franchisor's controlled CRM record.
- Record source, geography, stage timestamps, and one mutually exclusive exit reason.
- Report stage conversion as the next-stage numerator divided by the eligible prior-stage denominator.
- Keep still-open candidates visible; do not silently label them lost to improve speed metrics.
Under the U.S. FTC framework, financial performance representations generally belong in Item 19 when made, subject to the rule's scope and exceptions. Review the FTC consumer guide and FTC Franchise Rule Compliance Guide, then obtain franchise-counsel review. This page is not legal advice.
What belongs in the analysis?
Inclusions
Declared media, agency, creative, and tracking costs; unique candidates; cohort dates; geography; stage timestamps; and governed outcomes.
Exclusions
Organic demand unless separately tagged, unverifiable offline estimates, duplicate people, unresolved tests, legal conclusions, and retroactively changed stage rules.
Geography: publish results separately where process, disclosure, or franchise-law context differs. The FTC citations on this page support U.S. context only.
When is a rate ready to compare?
Set the minimum cohort maturity, eligible denominator, and observation window before launch. If that rule is not met, label the readout directional and show counts rather than a confident rate. Never merge cohorts merely to make a result look stable.
What this method cannot prove.
- Attribution does not establish that an ad alone caused a franchise sale.
- A client-defined commercial qualification stage is not legal or financial advice.
- Lagged open cohorts can move materially after a reporting date.
- One franchisor's funnel is not a portable market benchmark.
Research governance.
- Author
- Ivan Janku, founder, Digital Rocket
- Reviewer
- Digital Rocket editorial desk; franchise-counsel review remains required before legal reuse.
- Review date
- July 13, 2026
- Corrections
- Send source or definition corrections through the contact route.
- Owner
- Digital Rocket research and editorial desk
- Version
- 1.0; definitions must be versioned if changed.